Dealing with the shrinking volunteer pool

For the past nine years, I have been attending meetings of the boards and committees of a number of Yellow Springs nonprofits, either as staff, or as a board member. What was initially traumatic for me, speaking my mind at a meeting of sharp, dedicated people, has become as comfortable as the proverbial old slipper. During those nine years, the dynamic of the pool from which those boards draw their volunteers has changed. In short, volunteers have become older and fewer. I am neither the only one, nor the first to have noticed this. The shrinking volunteer pool, and what to do about it, has become the hot topic at almost every meeting I attend. In the process, I have become an advocate of disbanding organizations that have fulfilled their mission and merging others, where their missions will allow it. Yellow Springs, a village with a population of 3,700, has over 100 nonprofit organizations. I guess I'm thinking that if we are going to have fewer volunteers, we need to have less demand for their services.

In my day job as the Foundation Administrator of the Yellow Springs Community Foundation (YSCF), I am in a good position to notice what has been going on with local NPs. The first such situation to catch my attention was when Center Stage, the amateur theater group, ceased to function and donated their remaining assets to YSCF in memory of Jean Hooper. That was a few years ago. The next was the Leadership Institute, which, after four years of running the Leadership Yellow Springs program, couldn't recruit a big enough class to make continuing the program worthwhile. I was originally the administrator of that organization. I eventually resigned and joined the board. Shortly thereafter, we took her down. What we were selling, nobody was buying. So we disbanded and turned our assets over to YSCF to be used for "leadership purposes" consistent with our mission statement. Currently, the Yellow Springs Endowment for Education is in the process of becoming a donor advised field of interest fund at YSCF. They will continue to exist as an advisory committee for the types of grants they have traditionally funded for the schools. I guess you can call this a merger. Another long-time organization is talking to us about a similar arrangement. At the Library Association, where I serve as treasurer, we are taking a different tack. We are reducing the number of board members from nine to seven and meeting bimonthly, instead of every month.

This multitude of wonderful organizations was started by forward-thinking, civic-minded villagers who have mostly either aged to where they can no longer participate, or have passed on. They could not have foreseen the decline in village population and probably assumed that there would always be folks like them to run these groups. Almost every person I know who serves on a board where I am involved, also serves on at least one other board or committee. They often serve on three or four and are rapidly approaching burn-out. Unless, we can establish a younger volunteer pool, we will have to continue with our efforts to down-size the NPs. Efforts are being made in that direction. The problem is to identify potential volunteers and put them together with volunteer opportunities that suit their talents and preferences.

One of the groups I attend as a representative of the Community Foundation is the Nonprofit Network. It is a somewhat informal group made up of top staff of village nonprofits that have staff. We have been so consumed by this discussion that we have taken the opposite tack from the Library Association and increased our meetings from bimonthly to monthly. One of the things we are doing is identifying volunteer opportunities to satisfy the community service requirement for high school students. Hopefully, by catching them early, we can instill in them the same enthusiasm for volunteerism that the founders of these organizations had.